New Initiative: VISIONS FOR GROWTH—OPPORTUNITIES FOR BENEFACTORS
plus update: EXPANDING COMMUNITIES‘ REACH
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Founded in 1972, Communities magazine is the primary resource for information, stories, and ideas about intentional communities—including urban co-ops, cohousing groups, ecovillages, and rural communes. Communities also focuses on creating and enhancing community in the workplace, in nonprofit or activist organizations, and in neighborhoods. We explore the joys and challenges of cooperation in its many dimensions, and pass the wisdom on to you and your community.
Each full-color quarterly issue (64 to 88 pages) focuses on a specific theme. Subscriptions are available (allowing full back-issue access; see below) and more than 400 back-issue articles are posted for free public reading on the website (see sidebar at right for a randomly-generated sample; “refresh” to see a different set).
Our current issue is Communities #205: Across the Generations (available for individual order here). Coming in March 2025: Communities #206: Ecovillage Visions. Coming in June 2025: Communities #207: Breaking the Spell. We welcome article and photo/art submissions; please see submissions guidelines.
Now included in all print and digital subscriptions: Complete Access to All Current and Back Issues (200+ issues total, 10,000+ pages of material!) for Online Viewing and/or Download. ***Subscribers, please see instructions at gen-us/back-issues to access the issue archive.***
Please subscribe! We are a reader-powered publication, dependent on our community of supporters, writers, and readers for our existence. We invite and welcome your participation.
To advertise your business, organization, community, or project in Communities, please visit see information here or contact Joyce, Advertising Manager, at ads@gen-us.net for more information.
Thank you for being part of Communities magazine’s new life with Global Ecovillage Network–United States (GEN-US)! Donations are greatly appreciated.
Also, please see:
New Initiative: VISIONS FOR GROWTH—OPPORTUNITIES FOR BENEFACTORS
plus update: EXPANDING COMMUNITIES‘ REACH
Global Ecovillage Network-US is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization
Your contribution is tax-deductible. EIN: 62-1793769
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Your Support Is Essential
Communities is far from a conventional magazine. This is fortunate, as many conventional magazines have gone out of business this millennium. We benefit from a steady influx of new readers, drawn to the search for and exploration of collective solutions. Even more, we benefit from having long-term, dedicated readers, who appreciate what a cohesive magazine issue offers—an experience not easily replicated through blog posts or other quick-consumption internet-mediated formats. Communities is slow media, not quick media: six months go into the creation of every quarterly issue, and we hope it shows.
As long as Communities has a role to play, we want it to endure. You—our readers—are the ones who make this possible. You provided the support we needed a few years ago to make the transition to a new publisher—GEN-US—and you continue to provide the support necessary to stay in publication. Many of you make the choice to subscribe at Supporter or Sustainer levels, and also give additional donations, sometimes three- or four-figure donations, because you believe in and appreciate what Communities is and does.
It is a community, not a commercial undertaking, which is why we have been able to survive, continuing to reach everywhere from Ivy League libraries to backwoods off-the-grid homesteading collectives, from Communal Studies scholars to community-seekers, from long-term communitarians to brand-new intentional groups, from neighborhood activists to global networkers. Even though the numbers of international subscribers are modest, we reach every inhabited continent. And we not only produce new content every quarter, but also steward five decades’ worth of material: close to 200 back issues which are available in digital form to anyone who becomes a subscriber and has access to the internet.
Please help keep Communities alive through your subscriptions (gen-us.net/subscribe) and donations (gen-us.net/donate/magazine). All donations are fully tax-deductible. And please consider subscribing not only for yourself but for those you love who have interest in community, cooperation, and a livable planet.
Back Issue Sets Now Available at 30% Discount (US addresses)
To celebrate Communities’ 50th anniversary, we’ve compiled sets of all of our in-print back issues for which we have at least a dozen copies in stock. We are offering three entirely distinct sets. Two of them are available in very limited quantity because of low issue inventory, so if you’re interested, please act soon.
Back Issue Set A: Communities #s 143, 147, 148, 150, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 162, 163, 167, 168, 171, 172, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193 (37 issues total, from the years 2009-2021) – 12 sets available.
Back Issue Set B: Communitas 1, Communitas 2, Communities #s 3, 8, 26, 28, 39, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 66, 67, 70, 71/72, 82, 83, 105, 117, 138, 139, 140, 142, 144, 145, 146, 148, 151, 161, 164 (32 issues total, from the years 1972-2014) – only 2 sets available.
Back Issue Set C: Communities #s 79, 80/81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 90, 92, 93, 94, 96, 97, 100, 101, 102, 110, 112, 115, 118, 124, 125, 126, 136, 137, 141 (25 issues total, from the years 1993-2008) – only 2 sets available.
Individual sets, packaged in medium flat rate priority mail boxes, are available for $100 apiece $70 apiece (limited time only) (for A, B, or C) postpaid to US addresses, $120-140 postpaid to Canadian addresses, $150-170 postpaid to other international addresses where mailable.
All three sets together (A, B, and C) are available for $250 postpaid $175 postpaid (limited time only) to US addresses, $320-$370 postpaid to Canadian addresses, $410-$460 to other international addresses where mailable.
Please order at gen-us.net/back-issue-sets (or via postal mail to Oberlin address).
Dear Communities readers and friends,
In late 2019, Global Ecovillage Network–United States (GEN-US) became the new publisher of Communities, continuing the journal’s nearly 50-year publishing tradition. The magazine survived and exists today only because of an outpouring of financial and moral support from readers like you, who refused to let it go the way of too many publications which have needed to shut their doors in the face of a changing world and new economic circumstances.
We see Communities: Life in Cooperative Culture as a guidebook for that changing world—one that will help us find ways to live together more effectively in a new age in which we cannot ignore or escape the feedback loops, the effects of our actions and choices on the planet and on one another. If any doubt remained that we are living in an age of koyaanisqatsi (“unbalanced life” in Hopi), this past year-plus of pandemic, racial disparity laid bare, climate chaos, threats to democratic institutions, and much more has eliminated illusions about that. And at the same time, if those of us involved in intentional community and other manifestations of cooperative culture ever doubted that our choices held value and long-term relevance and applicability for our larger world, the last couple years have also eliminated our questions about that. Sharing the examples, lessons, stories, visions, practical guidance, and insights emerging from experiments in creating cooperative, regenerative culture in a world that sorely needs it has never seemed more important or urgent than it is today.
In service to that mission, we depend partly on subscription income to stay in print—and are appealing to you to renew your subscription, give gift subscriptions, encourage others to subscribe, and consider subscribing at “supporter” or “sustainer” levels if it is possible for you.
And at the same time, we depend on more than subscriptions to keep publishing. In fact, subscription income currently covers less than half of our annual expenses—and in fact, even adding in individual-copy, bundled-issue, and wholesale distribution of the magazine, “sales” as an entire category typically gets us only 45 to 60 percent toward our total budgetary needs. In this, we are not alone. Among what we consider “sister” publications, Orion derives only 30 percent of its budget from sales, and YES! less than half as well.
In our case, advertising income typically provides a 12 to 15 percent net boost to our budget. There is substantial room for growth in this area, and we encourage and welcome advertising from you or anyone you know with something to share that would be of interest to our readers.
But the rest of our budget, the key element that allows us to stay afloat financially, comes from donations.
If you see value in our work, we invite you to contribute, as many of you did last year, to making sure that Communities can continue to exist and work toward realizing its full potential. At the end of 2019, we raised over $30,000 in pledges (and eventual donations) to allow us to fulfill outstanding subscriptions and meet the costs of transitioning to our new publisher. In each subsequent year, we are aiming to raise $20,000—the amount that we believe necessary to avoid staff layoffs and other measures that could interfere with the magazine’s ability to thrive.
We on staff are determined to do all we can to keep this forum for long-form community storytelling, information-sharing, and inspiration alive and available for a world in need of resources like this one. In this effort, as is true with virtually all alternative media, we rely on extra financial help from those who see the value in the service we provide to the world.
You can find all the information you need about donating here: www.gen-us.net/donate/magazine. Please note that, especially with larger amounts, payments via check (made out to Communities Magazine, and mailed to Communities, c/o Roths, 330 Morgan St., Oberlin, OH 44074 USA), and/or “Friends and Family” PayPal payments (sent to publisher@gen-us.net), assure that the full amount of your donation comes to us. We welcome your donation in any form, however, and for those without a PayPal account, an online donation via SimpleCirc may be the easiest method: simplecirc.com/communities/item/1920/donation-to-communities-magazine.
Thank you so much for your support and readership! We look forward to many more years of Communities, with the aid of people like you.
Chris Roth, Editor, Communities